In a meandering review for the New York Times entitled “New-Look Bonaparte,” Bernard-Henri Lévy high-handedly damns French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s new book, Testimony: France in the Twenty-First Century to the bottom of the totem pole of books written by French politicians. Lévy, a French philosopher, self-styled intellectual, and recent author of a book that retraces the steps of Alexis de Tocqueville’s journey throughout the United States, devotes about a third of his piece in the Times to unraveling the innate desire of so many French politicians to write books.

Once he’s made it clear that Sarkozy is the least literary among them, failing to pen a book about his vision of France, he graciously condenses the value of Sarkozy’s book for us as “a precise and priceless live self-portrait.”

Of what does this “live self-portrait” consist? Mostly Lévy’s own chatty observations, which only occasionally land on Sarkozy’s book (“So in light of all that, why did I not vote for him?”). One gem in his bag of literary insights:

Sarkozy is the only person I know who is a perfect Sartrean subject — the prototype of that subjectivity described in “Being and Nothingness” that draws its strength, and even its freedom, from the fact that it has no inner core, nothing in reserve; as if it were an empty place, a mere transit zone in which impressions, information and emotions spin around without stopping or connecting.

Lévy again invokes the specter of Sartre in describing how Sarkozy’s disgust with anti-Americanism somehow equates with lacking memory altogether (Sartre would have called this “the politics of bastards,” writes Lévy):

He is our first president without a memory. He is the first of our presidents willing to listen to all ideas, because for him they are literally indistinguishable. If there is a man in France today who embodies (or claims to embody) the famous end of all ideologies, which I cannot quite bring myself to believe in, it is indeed Mr. Sarkozy, the sixth president of the Fifth Republic.

Lévy’s review seems to be the only clear self-portrait on display here.